"I want to apologise to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning. The BlackBerry service is now fully restored, and I can report that no data or messages were lost," Thorsten Heins, chief executive of RIM, said in a statement.

According to Heins, as many as six percent of BlackBerry customers in the region could have been unable to access RIM's services. The outage in sending or getting messages lasted a maximum of three hours, the company's early investigation indicates.

"We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes," Heins said.

However, he did not say whether Vodafone was at fault, as some users were told.